While both regions experienced political rupture in the nineteenth century Venezuela’s separation from Gran Colombia in 1830 and the territorial division between Mexico and the United States in 1848, cultural life did not fragment along the same lines. Instead, shared folkways persisted and evolved, sustained through binational forms of media that operated across borders.
The poster presents a visual comparison structured in two parallel panels, emphasizing how both cases reveal transnational cultural infrastructures.
The first panel analyzes the documentary Chulas Fronteras (1976), focusing particularly on the cross-border radio culture that sustained conjunto and Chicano music in the Rio Grande Valley. Through radio transmission, performance, lyrics, and shared audiences, this music circulated across the Rio Grande, producing a cultural space that was neither fully Mexican nor fully American, but distinctly borderland. A QR code allows viewers to listen to excerpts, emphasizing sound as an embodied practice that sustains community beyond political division.
The second panel examines El Valle, a cultural newspaper published in 1865 in the Colombia–Venezuela border region. More than a political periodical, El Valle functioned as a binational literary print network, circulating writers and ideas across national lines. An article referencing Jorge Isaacs demonstrates how intellectual exchange continued transnationally only decades after political separation. This print culture reveals a shared cultural sphere that resisted rigid national demarcation and continued to imagine Colombia and Venezuela as a common “amado suelo.”
By placing these two media forms radio music culture and literary print networks in dialogue, the poster argues that borderlands are actively produced through transnational communication systems. Music and print culture do not merely survive political rupture; they generate the social conditions that sustain hybridity, coexistence, and continuity across borders.